Child Psychiatric Services: Helping Children With Divorce

Relationships & Family Blog

If your family is going through a divorce, your children may need to confront emotional and psychological challenges they aren't equipped to deal with. Child psychiatric services, however, can provide evidence-based treatments that help your child develop self-regulation and communication skills that will help them cope with their feelings.

Self-Regulation

When child experience trauma, their ability to respond appropriately to situation can become compromised, as if their emotional compass swirls out of control at the slightest change in direction. Teaching them to reset this compass autonomously can be the key to helping them cope with the changes that can come with a divorce.

• Scaffold the Skill: Self-regulation is a skill that can be taught just like any academic subject. A child psychiatrist will often start by having your child describe things that frustrate them. These can be major things, like switching between homes, dealing with step-parents, etc., to more benign things like math homework or a slow WiFi connection. Regardless of the circumstance, the child psychiatrist can coach your child to be more aware of how they react when they confront frustrating things in their life. Once your child becomes cognizant of their reaction mechanisms and coping strategies, your child psychiatrist can help them scaffold a variety of self-regulation skills.

Communication

When children feel heard and understood, they are better able to deal with major life challenges, like a divorce. As your child grows, so should their communication skills and techniques.

• Beyond Binary: a bad moment doesn't need to make for a terrible day; life doesn't have to be either happy or sad. Helping your child to get past the binary traps that predispose them to become trapped by their feelings can help them confront the many hurdles they're likely to face during a divorce. A child psychiatrist will often use signal phrasing exercises to help your child communicate in more nuanced ways. For example, instead of simply saying, "My day is going terrible," your child can start expressing themselves like this, "Although I had a fight with my dad this morning, I passed my math test and had fun hanging out with my friends at lunch." Although this technique might seem simplistic, coaching your child to evolve from the black and white thinking that allows a temporary hurdle from becoming a series of future frustrations can be transformative. This is particularly true when dealing with the stages of divorce, as each stage will present unique challenges

Talk to a professional like Linet Les for child psychiatric services.

Share

28 April 2020